December 13, 2012 Video & Multimedia A Man Pronounces the Longest Word in the World By Sadie Stein If you so choose, watch one Dmitry Glubovskyi pronouncing the longest word in the world, the 189,819-letter chemical name for titin (which is, appropriately enough, the largest protein in the world). Warning: it takes three hours. To quote the Daily News, “It gets really good at the 1:32:54 mark, when a pack of corgis invades.” We’ll take their word for it.
December 6, 2012 Video & Multimedia The Making of Motherwell By Sadie Stein If you love beautiful books, check out this marvelous video from the Dedalus Foundation, in which we see the production of Robert Motherwell Painting and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941–1991.
December 6, 2012 Video & Multimedia And Everywhere That Mary Went By Sadie Stein On December 6, 1877, Thomas Edison made one of the first recordings of the human voice, a phonograph recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Below, Edison recites the nursery rhyme. This was not Mary’s sole claim to fame. The nursery rhyme, written by Sarah Josepha Hale and published in Boston in 1830, was inspired by the story of a young girl named Mary Sawyer, who had an inseparable pet lamb. The tune was added shortly thereafter. To this day, a statue of Mary and her lamb stands in the town center of Sterling, Massachusetts.
November 30, 2012 Video & Multimedia In Honor of Jonathan Swift … By Sadie Stein On this day in 1667, Jonathan Swift was born. In his honor, we bring you 1902’s Le voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et chez les géants, by pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
November 27, 2012 Video & Multimedia Early Adaptors By Sadie Stein Sherlock Holmes Baffled, which Arthur Marvin made in 1900 (and released three years later), is acknowledged to be the sleuth’s first onscreen appearance. However, it would seem that the thirty-second film may also be the very first cinematic literary adaptation. (Although in fairness, it would be hard to say which case the film portrays. One in which Holmes is baffled, presumably.)
November 21, 2012 Video & Multimedia Animated Discussion By Sadie Stein We love illustrator Damien Florebert Cuypers and Benoît François’s new animated project, Stories of Philosophies. As he describes it, each episode is composed of two parts, each of which presents a philosopher reacting to the presence of an object in the manner of his well-known philosophical vision. The following features René Descartes and Nietzsche. Stories of Philosophies from Histoires de Philosophies on Vimeo.